This application claims the benefit of a Japanese Patent Application No. 11-304627 filed Oct. 26, 1999, in the Japanese Patent Office, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to electronic apparatuses, control apparatuses and storage media, and more particularly to an electronic apparatus having an electronic mail function, a control apparatus for controlling such an electronic apparatus, and a computer-readable storage medium which stores a program for causing a computer to have the electronic mail function.
In this specification, an electronic apparatus refers to an apparatus having an electronic mail function, and includes computers such as personal computers, word processors, electronic notebooks, and intelligent telephone sets which includes various functions in addition to the normal telephone functions. In addition, the electronic mail function refers to a function including sending and/or receiving electronic mail (e-mail). The electronic mail function may of course include functions of creating and editing electronic mail.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional electronic mail systems basically use a text-based signature file, and an electronic mail is transmitted by adding a predetermined signature file or, by writing a signature within a document by character information. For this reason, the signature file itself does not have a specific function.
A multi-media electronic mail environment is already provided, and enables images such as photographs and/or audio to be included in the electronic mail, and also enables processing of audio-based or image-based electronic mail. However, the signature file remains in the text form.
Accordingly, if the signature file is copied, a third person can easily impersonate as another person. As a result, it is impossible to judge by a simple means whether or not a sender of the electronic mail is actually the person himself, thereby making the security of the electronic mail poor.
For example, a Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application no. 3-106141 proposes a document circulating system which displays on a circulating document an icon for indicating an existence of a comment.
In addition, a Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 5-204795 proposes an electronic mail system which has the functions of displaying a destination and a portrait of the sender for confirmation, listing people with the same name or position in a file, and transmitting the electronic mail based on a symbol such as the portrait.
Users of electronic mail are increasing every year due to the rapid growth of the Internet and intranet. Recently, communication functions and electronic mail software are in many cases installed as standard functions in an operating system (OS). Hence, the communication speed is increasing in the internet and local area networks (LANs). As a result, it has recently become possible to exchange data having a large size which was realistically impossible to exchange conventionally due to the limited communication speed. In addition, even in the general electronic mail software and the like, documents having the HTML format are supported in most cases, and it is anticipated that the number of users who will use such software will considerably increase in the future. Accordingly, it is desirable to further improve the electronic mail system to suit the multi-media electronic mail environment.
However, as is the case of the electronic mail system proposed in the Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 5-204795 described above, although the conventional proposed electronic mail system has the function of transmitting the electronic mail based on the symbol such as the portrait, it is impossible to confirm at the receiving end that the received portrait and the sender of the electronic mail are the same person. For this reason, it is impossible to prevent a third person from improperly copying the image of the electronic mail and impersonating as another person. In other words, there are problems in that there is no simple method of confirming that the sender of the electronic mail is the person himself, and that the security of the electronic mail is poor.
In addition, the conventional electronic mail system provides no means of simply comprehending the importance of the received electronic mail or the summary of the contents of the received electronic mail before reading the received electronic mail. As a result, there are problems in that the user cannot know the importance and the contents of the summary of the received electronic mail until the user actually reads the received electronic mail, and that a so-called junk mail cannot be confirmed unless the junk mail is actually read.